Flu season is right around the corner, which means if they haven’t already, many of the students and faculty at Hills will be getting their flu shots. Flu shots are a fairly common type of vaccination in terms of how they work. Flu vaccines are inactivated vaccines, which means that they work by injecting the patient with the inactivated or “dead” virus (the flu virus is called influenza). This technique introduces the virus to the immune system without causing any real damage, like it would if it were an active virus. That way, memory T cells, a type of immune cell that “remembers” pathogens that have triggered an immune response in the past, will remember the influenza virus, so that when you get infected by the influenza virus for real, your body will be prepared to fight it. Vaccines are not a curative medicine, they are a preventative medicine. By getting a vaccine, you are preventing yourself from getting the virus, or from experiencing severe and long-term symptoms if you do get it.
Inactivated vaccines are one of the many types of vaccines, and there is another type that has become of special interest in recent years: mRNA vaccines. mRNA vaccines became popularized from Covid-19, but scientists have been conducting studies related to this vaccine for decades.
Medline Plus explains that RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is a molecule that is in all living things. mRNA is a type of RNA called messenger RNA. Messenger RNA acts as a temporary copy of your body’s DNA. DNA, or diphosphate nucleic acid, carries all of the instructions to make life. In other words, DNA acts as a “blueprint” that tells your cells how to make proteins, which are commonly known as the “building blocks of life” because proteins make up a lot of different tissue and muscles in the body. But, proteins can also be cell receptors, hormones and enzymes, which are all critical to allowing your body to function the way it does. mRNA is the messenger – it makes a copy of the DNA instructions and hands it out to the protein construction site in cells (the ribosome) so that the cells can produce the right proteins.
According to Cleveland Clinic, mRNA vaccines function by harnessing the powers of mRNA. Scientists design synthetic mRNA in a lab that encodes for a recognisable piece of the virus that they want to target. The vaccine injects this synthetic mRNA to your body cells, your cells read the mRNA and produce that portion of the virus. This piece of the virus is recognized by your immune system as a foreign invader, triggers immune response and activates memory T-cells, which will then remember the virus if it ever comes back. In the end, they work the same way that an inactivated vaccine would to protect you from contracting the virus.
As reported by Cleveland Clinic, there are a few key benefits of using mRNA vaccines:
The use of synthetic mRNA will only provide your cells with the instruction to create a portion of the virus, so there is no risk of you actually getting sick. Working with live or dead viruses is always risky, so the synthetic mRNA is a great alternative.
mRNA vaccines are a lot easier and faster to produce than other vaccines because they only require the genetic code for the virus. There is no need to undergo the meticulous and time consuming processes of growing or manipulating viruses in the lab. This also makes large scale production much easier and faster during pandemics.
mRNA vaccines use synthetic RNA, meaning that it does not require any cell cultures in the lab. This makes large scale production much easier and faster during pandemics.
mRNA vaccines are temporarily within your system. After a little while, they break down naturally, which means that they aren’t going to infiltrate your cell nucleus or disrupt your DNA at all, making it a safe, nonpermanent treatment option.
On the other hand, it is very difficult to store the synthetic mRNA that is used in mRNA vaccines, even harder than storing the inactivated viruses, which proves an obstacle in perpetuating the usage of mRNA vaccines.
Medline Plus points out that the only two mRNA vaccines that are in circulation right now are Comirnaty® (Pfizer-BioNTech) and Spikevax® (Moderna), which are both used to treat Covid-19. mRNA vaccines harness our knowledge of biotechnology and drug delivery principles, and are now presenting doctors and scientists with an intriguing new opportunity to prevent illness. These vaccines have the potential to go far beyond treating Covid-19, and our scientists are just getting started.